“Be careful, Kimo.”
“I won’t take you down with me,” I said. “Anything you say that takes any part of this on you, I’m denying it.”
“Just tell the truth. If I’ve got anything coming to me I’ll take it.” He looked at me hard. “I’m serious, Kimo. You lie to the bosses, it makes you no better than the criminals who lie to us. It makes our jobs worth nothing.”
“I’ll tell the truth. And the truth is I made all my own trouble.”
By the time I got back home it was time to leave for Terri’s house in Wailupe. If the department was giving me an enforced vacation, I might as well enjoy it.
Danny was glad to see me, and the three of us squeezed into my truck for the ride out to Makapu’u Point instead of taking one of Terri’s cars. “Makes it more like an outing,” I said. We put the picnic stuff in the back along with my surfboards.
When we arrived, Danny ran down to the shoreline to poke around and I helped Terri lay out lunch for us. “He hardly talked this morning,” she said. “I was worried we were going right back where we were.”
“Give him time. I’m sure he hurts just as much as you do, but he doesn’t know how to channel it. The good thing is kids heal a lot faster than grown-ups.” I spread a big blanket for the three of us and sat down on it. While Terri put out the food, I said, “I had a case last year, multiple homicide in a crack house on a side street off Kuhio Avenue. This woman was dealing, and she had her four little kids in the house with her. These two guys from the mainland came in and shot the woman and the kids and stole the crack.”
“How awful,” Terri said.
“Long way from Punahou, isn’t it? One kid survived, a six-year-old girl. She was smart way beyond her years. I mean, from her hospital bed she told us exactly what happened, described the two guys so that an artist could draw them, everything we needed. She even remembered the street name of one of the guys. We picked them up within hours.” I shook my head. “Then it was like she shut down, totally. Went into cardiac arrest, though the doctors couldn’t figure out why. They had to shock her twice to bring her back. And you know what? We had a follow-up hearing last month, and I saw her. She’s living with foster parents, going to school, and she looks like just the sweetest, happiest little seven-year-old you’ve ever seen. You’d never know anything happened to her.”
I opened the bag of potato chips and took one. “Of course, you don’t know what’s going on inside her head, how it all marked her, but she’s surviving. Danny will survive, too. It just might take a while.”
She called Danny back to eat, and he brought with him an assemblage of treasures-an odd-shaped rock, an iridescent shell fragment, and the bleached claw of a sand crab. I admired them each in turn and he sat down next to me to eat, his little foot pressing into the side of my leg, making the physical connection.
I think the hardest thing for me about accepting my sexuality and all its implications was thinking that I would never have children of my own. I know it’s theoretically possible, but it wouldn’t be the way I’d always imagined it. I really wanted to be a dad, and I thought I’d be a good one. I think my parents did a pretty good job of raising me, though I did feel my father worked too much, that he didn’t give enough of his time to me and my brothers. I wanted to make up for that with my own kid, to see a little part of me reflected in him, to marvel at the perfection of his tiny fingers and toes and then watch him grow up in the world.
Akoni didn’t want to have kids. He said he’s seen so much horror in the world, so many awful things that people do to each other, that he couldn’t imagine having, as he calls it, “a hostage to fate.” I felt just the opposite. Sure, I’ve seen just as much misery and tragedy, but I always saw the way people recovered, the way the human species was designed to go in the face of almost insurmountable odds. It gave me faith that a kid could actually survive.
After we finished eating, we sat around on the beach. Danny and I tried flipping pogs, but the sand was too unsteady a base. Instead we just lay together in a haphazard mass, Terri’s feet touching my leg, Danny’s head resting on my chest, and dozed. Then the sun passed behind a cloud for a bit and the coolness in the air woke us up.
I carefully shifted Danny’s head to the blanket next to me, and stood up and stretched. “I think I’ll surf for a bit, if you don’t mind,” I said to Terri.
“Go ahead. This is nice, just lying here relaxing.”
Danny woke up then and said, “Can I go with you, Kimo?”
“Tell you what, Danny, let me check out the waves, okay? Then I’ll come back for you and give you a little lesson.”
“Okay.” He pulled his legs up close to him, wrapped his arms around them, and sat there watching me as I walked down the beach.
I worked on my turns for a while, surfing back and forth along the beach, watching Danny, and then came to pick him up. “You’re sure it’s okay?” Terri asked anxiously. “The surf looked pretty strong out there.”
“I’ll take care of him. Come on, Danny.” He took my hand, and we walked carefully into the water. The bottom was rough there, and the undertow was strong, but he held my hand until we got a few feet out, and then I lifted him and sat him on my board.
We didn’t go very far out, just beyond the first line of shallow breakers. I stood him up on my board, me standing in the water next to him, and held him as the board crested over the light waves. It was just the way I’d been taught to surf when I was a kid, learning to keep my balance on the board. Since he’d boogie boarded before, he understood the waves, and pretty soon all I was doing was acting as his safety, my arms in a broad arc around him in case he fell.
Finally I said, “I think it’s time to go in, champ,” and picked him up off the board. I carried him in past the rough part, and then swam back out for my board, floating on the tide. “Did you see, Mommy?” he called out as he ran up the beach. “I was surfing!”
“I saw,” Terri said.
She started to clean up the picnic things, but Danny was antsy and couldn’t sit still. “Tell you what, Terri,” I said. “Why don’t Danny and I take a little walk while you clean up?” I leaned down to Danny’s level. “You want to do that, champ? We can walk along the water line and see what else we can find for your collection.”
“Yeah,” he said eagerly, and he reached up for my hand. We started down the shore, looking out at Rabbit Island, and Danny pointed there and said, “My dad always promised to take me out there.” He looked down at the ground. “We never went.”
“I can take you out there sometime,” I said. He didn’t say anything, but held on tight to my hand. “Danny, what happened the day your Dad died?”
He was silent.
“It’s important,” I said. “Knowing would make your Mom feel a lot better.”
He stopped walking, and I sat down on a piece of rock and made a place next to me for him. He sat close to me and said, “I was taking a nap, and I heard these men yelling.”
Shit, I thought. “How many men?”
“Two.” He continued, in short phrases, as if he was building up his strength for each new clause. “I was scared… and then I heard this really loud noise… and, and then… I heard the men go out the door.” He stopped and took a big gulp of breath. “Then, then I went… to the door… of my dad’s study, and, and I looked in, and there he was.”
“So you never saw the men?” I asked. He shook his head. He didn’t say anything else for a while, and so we just sat there, me with my arm around him. He started to cry again, slowly and quietly. “It’s okay, Danny,” I said. “Nobody can hurt you anymore.”
He looked up at me. “That’s all I remember, until, until you came, to, to the house.”
I used the edge of my shirt to dry his eyes. We sat like that for a while, him against me, until I finally said, “What do you say we head back to your mom?” and he agreed, and I hoisted him up on my shoulders and we walked back to Terri.
It was just twilight when we got back to Wailupe, the sky shading between violet and black. The warm breeze coming through the windows of my truck moved the scent of salt water and coconut tanning oil lazily around us. Terri sent Danny inside and stood outside the truck, leaning in the window. “Thanks for today, Kimo. It was good for both of us.”